Honestly, it’s gotten harder and harder to write about our Military and our Vets getting screwed all the time by the people for whom they work/worked. If you don’t know what I’m talking about by now, you just don’t give a rat’s a$$ and probably won’t in the foreseeable future.

Time for me to step back for a bit.

The most important thing is that there are so many more voices out there ( Hooah!) now than when I started my blog. So, the urgency for me to get out the information and news about our Troops and Vets issues has lessened considerably. The links to other blogs, good blogs, on my sidebar covering these topics happily just keeps growing.

Hell, I’ve been doing this blogging thing for about 6 years now. It’s been terrific fun and I’ve met so many wonderful Patriots and Military folk here on the net. Precious times. Kept me sane.

But, I’m getting cranky and impatient and frustrated ~ too much ignorance and complacency still to be found in our citizenry. We’ve been at war for 10 years and I still come across too many people who have no clue as to what our Troops are doing or why. Or that our National Defense’s first string is getting massacred by their CinC, civilian leaders and political correctness ~ again. (Gotta love those community organizers and career politicians…) Or that there are so many, yet too few, wonderful people doing amazing things in support of our Troops and Vets. (And Michele O. ~ they were doing it long before you ever gave the Troops a first thought, nevermind a second thought.)

The great disconnect between civilians and military.

People I have talked to complain about the younger generation’s lack of respect, manners, ambition. I tell them that’s because our best are not here but wearing a uniform overseas, dodging bullets and IEDs. Or going through months of physical therapy at a Military hospital. Or helping other Vets transition home. Or helping others get on with their life after losing body parts. Or raising money for organizations who do such things. You know, all those things the media doesn’t see fit to report.

Did I mention I’m getting cranky?

So, it’s time I just take a little vacation. I really need to get my sense of humor back.

“The loss of Jason Rogers is going to make this world an emptier and lonelier and colder place,” said childhood friend Brandon Winfield. “I could write a War and Peace-sized story of the kind of person he was. Some people have it — the room just seemed to be dizzier and brighter with him in it.”

SSgt. Rogers was KIA on April 7 by an IED while on patrol with his unit in the Helmond Province of Afghanistan.

“He was doing something voluntarily that he loved to do, and he felt like he was making a difference and doing something that made other people proud,” said friend Derrick Brownlee.

Tonight I’ll be talking about what the Congress has in mind for the Military in the coming year: Defense budget cuts, diversity in all branches, minorities and promotions, mandatory job training and what’s seen as wrong with the Army.

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a serviceman, missing in action from World War II, have been identified and are being returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

Pfc. Robert B. Bayne, of Dundalk, Md., will be buried on May 7 in his hometown. On March 28, 1945, while patrolling the Rhine River in an inflatable raft, Bayne, a lieutenant and two other enlisted men were attacked near Schwegenheim, Germany. Bayne and the officer were wounded, forcing all four men into the swift waters of the river. The lieutenant was rescued but the enlisted men were not found.

Between 1945 and 1946, Army Graves Registration personnel exhumed remains of three men from two different locations when German citizens reported the graves contained remains of American soldiers recovered from the river in March 1945. Among items found with the remains were military identification tags. Two of the men were identified as enlisted men from the raft — Pvt. Edward Kulback and Pfc. William Gaffney — but due to limited forensic science of the time, the remains of the other individual could not be identified and were interred at the U.S. Military Cemetery in St. Avold, France as “unknown.”

In 1948, the remains of the unknown soldier were exhumed to compare them to available records for Bayne. After several years of analysis the remains could not be identified and were reinterred as unknown at the Rhone American Cemetery and Memorial in Draguignan, France, in 1951.

More than 60 years later, analysts from DPMO and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) developed case leads, evaluated records and determined that modern forensic technology could offer methods to identify the remains. In 2010, the remains were exhumed once again for analysis.

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC used dental comparisons and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used mitochondrial DNA — which matched that of Bayne’s brothers — in the identification of his remains.

At the end of the war, the U.S. government was unable to recover and identify approximately 79,000 Americans. Today, more than 74,000 are unaccounted-for from the conflict.

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO website at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call 703-699-1169.

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office announced today that the remains of a serviceman, missing in action from the Korean War, have been identified and are being returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

Army Cpl. Primo C. Carnabuci of Old Saybrook, Conn., will be buried May 12 in his hometown. On Nov. 1, 1950, Carnabuci’s unit, the 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, occupied a defensive position along the Kuryong River, near Unsan, North Korea. Chinese units attacked the area and forced a withdrawal. Almost 600 men, including Carnabuci, were reported missing or killed in action following the battle.

In 2000, a joint U.S-Democratic People’s Republic of Korea team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), excavated a mass grave discovered earlier in Unsan County, south of the area known as “Camel’s Head.” The team recovered remains of at least five individuals as well as military clothing.

Analysts from DPMO and JPAC developed case leads with information spanning more than 58 years. They evaluated the circumstances surrounding the soldier’s death and researched wartime documentation on the movements of U.S. and enemy forces on the battlefield.

Among forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC used dental comparisons and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used mitochondrial DNA — which matched that of Carnabuci’s brother — in the identification.

With this identification, 7,997 service members still remain missing from the conflict.

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO website at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call 703-699-1420.

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas – Among the U.S. Navy SEALs who carried out the mission to get Osama bin Laden was a dog, one of over 1,000 military working dogs serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and trained at the Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio.

These dogs are mainly used to find IED’s, or improvised explosive devices, the biggest killer of American soldiers.

These are dogs of war. Some have been to Iraq and Afghanistan, others are training for their deployment as bomb sniffers, or as specialized search dogs looking for those who planted the bombs or as protectors of their handlers – the men and women they work with.

LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas – It is an intense training program for both dogs and handlers. Not all dogs will make it, but those who do will be as important on the battlefield as any piece of machinery.

These military working dogs and their incredible sense of smell can find an explosive device in the ground, in a building, or in a car, saving whole platoons of soldiers.

SSgt. James I. Spurrier, Jr., aka Junior J. Spurrier, distinguished himself multiple times during WWII. One of which, almost single handedly capturing the village of Achain, France, won him the Medal Of Honor. But after the war, SSg. Spurrier had a tough time. Trouble with alcohol and run ins with the law. All due to PTSD.

You can read more about SSg. Spurrier here and here. And if you, or someone you know, is suffering with PTSD there is help.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.

We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

After a weeklong round of the CinC’s national-not-spiking-the football-spiking-the-football tours, I’m sick and disgusted beyond belief of all the fawning media’s overuse of the word “gutsy”. Making a call that anyone sitting in the Oval Office seat would make is not all that “gutsy”. Appropriate and correct, yes. Gutsy, not so much. Sending a special Team in to do a dangerous mission is serious and, for most, soul-twisting, yes. (And we appreciate the decision and planning by so many who, who because of national security,etc., sadly remained anonymous.) The Team going into an uncertain situation with their lives at risk was gutsy, most definitely. Sitting in a safe room far away from the action with only your political life at risk? Not so much, in the larger scheme of things.

When you say good night to a loved one or say thank you to a stranger, you use an ability that most of us take for granted-speech. After my interview with AW2 Soldier SGT Ian Ralston, I asked myself, how exactly do I speak? Do I first think about speaking? Do I tense my muscles and ligaments to form words? The reality is that for the vast majority of us, we don’t think about how we speak, we just speak. For Ralston, this was an ability he thought he had lost forever.

“I want to give back to the Soldiers who fight for my freedom and sacrifice their life for me,” said AW2 Soldier CPL Kendra Coleman about her future.

At 20-years-old, she knew she wanted to fight in the war on terrorism and joined the Army on July 25, 2007. She served with the 173D Special Troops Battalion, part of the 173D Airborne Brigade Combat Team as a military police (MP) officer and paratrooper. She deployed to Afghanistan on November 19, 2009, and her job was to train Afghan police and keep the local village of Charkh safe.

Competition. It’s a fundamental aspect of athleticism that for some pushes them to achieve higher levels of excellence. For retired AW2 Veteran and handcyclist Joe Beimfohr, it was his electric, adrenaline-fueled, competitiveness that pushed him towards the finish line at Monday’s 2011 Boston Marathon in Boston, MA. Beimfohr’s performance landed him second place overall in the handcycling division and a personal best record, completing the 26.2 miles in 1 hour and 34 minutes. When asked what pushed him across the finish line, Beimfohr responded, “I’m just competitive as hell.”

These are just a few of the hundreds of stories of our wounded warriors, who not only enlisted in a time of war on two fronts, but also continue to grab life by the horns and live it on their terms, overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges along the way.